His work focused on the comic mishaps of Jewish-Australian men (often writers) of Lurie's generation, who are invariably jazz fans.
His first novel was the comic Rappaport (Hodder and Stoughton, 1966) and focused on a day in the life of a young Melbourne antique dealer and his immature friend, Friedlander.
Lurie's self-exile from Australia to Europe, the UK and Northern Africa provides much of the material for his fiction.
Subsequent novels are Seven Books for Grossman (1983)—really a novella parodying the styles of various authors—and Madness (1991), about a writer dealing with a mentally unstable girlfriend.
[5] Novels and short story collections Essays and journalism Other books include a collection of plays called Waterman (1979); an autobiography Whole Life (1987); and a number of children's books, including the popular Twenty-Seventh Annual African Hippopotamus Race (1969), which schoolchildren in Victoria voted their favourite young storybook by an Australian author.